Latest News
2013 Muster List
Where to see us this year:
25th-27th May 2013, Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire (Major Muster)
22nd-23rd June 2013, Naseby Battlefield, Northamptonshire
20th-21st July 2013, English Heritage History Live! 2013 (Festival of History), Kelmarsh, Northamptonshire
3rd-4th August 2013, Skipton Castle, North Yorkshire (a Trayned Bandes event)
24th-26th August 2013, Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire (Major Muster)
14th-15th September 2013, Lotherton Hall, West Yorkshire
19th-20th October 2013, HRP The Tower of London
(Please keep checking the site for updates).
Photos: John Beardsworth and Rusty Aldwinckle
Other News
Photos from the Tower of London 1647 display, taken by Rusty Aldwinckle, have been added to the 2012 Photos page.
Photos: Rusty Aldwinckle
We would like to express our appreciation to Historic Royal Palaces for allowing the regiment the opportunity to perform at its ancestral home for the third year running and for giving us permission to post these images.
Tower of London article in Skirmish magazine
Issue 83 of Skirmish magazine included an article about our 2010 display at the Tower of London with a number of photos taken during the weekend.
Putney Debates article in Past Horizons
Issue 6 of "Past Horizons", the online magazine of British Archaeological Jobs and Resources, features an article about our Putney Debates Living History event.
Click here to read it.
Cromwell article in Skirmish magazine
Issue 66 of Skirmish magazine contained an article about the "Cromwell: God's Executioner" filming, with a number of photos from the shoot. Copies of the magazine can be ordered direct from the publisher here.
"Cromwell: God's Executioner"
During the winter of 2007, the Tower Hamlets Trayned Bandes, with colleagues from other re-enactment regiments, were involved in filming some of the re-enactment scenes for "Cromwell in Ireland" (released as "Cromwell: God's Executioner"), a 2-part documentary series made by Tile Films which was shown on RTE in September and on the History Channel in November 2008. Members of the regiment played the roles of New Model Army soldiers and also some of their Royalist and Confederate Catholic counterparts.
The series was presented by Irish historian Dr. Micheál Ó Siochrú with contributions from a number of Irish and English experts in the period, and challenged some of the established notions of the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland.
It won the 'Best Single Documentary' category at the Irish Film and Television Academy (IFTA) award ceremony in February 2009.
Reviews:
”Ó Siochrú’s recent work, God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland, clearly forms the bones of the documentary, with its lavish re-enactments, CGI and excellent direction by Maurice Sweeney.
”If nothing else, it might make production companies think again about the clumsy, ill-dressed re-enactments that have become such a feature of so many low-budget history documentaries on Irish television.
”So, Cromwell in Ireland, made in association with the History Channel, looks good, so good you’d wonder why they didn’t go the whole hog, raise the really big money and make a film of it. It’s waiting to be done.”
Sunday Business Post
"And the two-part drama, which has received rave reviews since it was shown in Ireland last month, packs something of a punch with impressive actor Owen Roe taking the role of Cromwell.
"The production feels more like a mini-film rather than a historical documentary, due to the impressive effects and number of people used to recreate some of the fierce battles which consumed the small nation on Cromwell’s orders.
"But such constructed drama is balanced effectively by actors reading poignant original source material to depict the thoughts, perceptions and memories of those involved in the conflict — including letters written by Cromwell himself."
Irish Post
"Over two parts, this top-class Irish documentary makes the case for and against Cromwell. Presented by historian Micheál Ó Siochrú, it is sobering viewing, but beautifully made."
Radio Times
"Cromwell: God's Executioner" Photos: Rusty Aldwinckle. There are more photos from the filming here.
The YouTube trailer for the programme is here.
Entertaining the crowd at Putney (Photo: ashmorevisuals)
Putney Debates, Putney, October 27-28th 2007
On the weekend of 27th and 28th October, the Tower Hamlets Trayned Bandes took part in the 360th anniversary celebrations of the New Model Army's Putney Debates at St Mary the Virgin Church, Putney. The military re-enactment was part of a week-long programme of events to mark one of the key milestones in the development of democracy in England and across the world: the call for a written constitution, universal (male) suffrage, a regular timetable for parliaments to sit, freedom of conscience and equality before the law - the agenda of the radical political Independents or Leveller movement.
We set up a soldiers' encampment in the churchyard overlooking the River Thames and while the regimental goodwives set about cooking food for the assembled company, the menfolk were kept busy on guard duty, performing drill and a variety of other chores. In view of the confined nature of the churchyard, all musket firing took place over the river wall into the Thames and was so loud - due to the sound reverberating round the church wall, the arches of Putney Bridge and the houses on the opposite bank - that visitors claimed to have heard it up to a mile away. The sound also drew a large crowd onto the bridge itself.
On the Sunday morning we were invited by the vicar to join the parishioners and their guests inside St Mary's for the service. The readings were all associated with the Debates and included the well-known words of Colonel Thomas Rainsborough which have rung down through the centuries:
For really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he; and therefore truly, sir, I think it's clear, that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under; and I am confident that, when I have heard the reasons against it, something will be said to answer those reasons, insomuch that I should doubt whether he was an Englishman or no, that should doubt of these things.
The congregation took communion to the accompaniment of the soldiers, goodwives and children singing period psalms and religious songs, and contemporary tunes from Alan Radford the regimental piper. Later in the afternoon, as the bells of St Mary's rang a three-hour peal based on an original from the seventeenth century, the regiment provided a guard of honour for a group of civic dignitaries from the House of Commons including Black Rod and the MP for Putney, Justine Greening, who were rowed across from Parliament in a replica seventeenth-century barge.
All in all this was not only a really enjoyable experience, but also a humbling one. Throughout the weekend the churchyard was filled with a large appreciative audience, many of whom stayed for several hours and some returned on the following day. It was a very special thing to be able to march, drill, sing, eat and sleep on the actual site, and on the anniversary of the original Putney Debates.
The Levellers' political manifesto, 'An Agreement of the People', was not, of course, adopted by the Army when the Debates concluded in November 1647, but it contains much that we now hold dear and some things that we still only aspire to. In 2006, readers of The Guardian newspaper voted the Putney Debates as the one neglected event in Britain's radical past that best deserves a proper monument. It now has one: St Mary's has set up a small permanent exhibition inside the nave which is well worth a look, or visit www.putneydebates.com.
See some pictures from the event.